The Hat Tree as Therapy
Reading it through that lens, the play makes even more sense. The structure itself — the meta-theatrical scaffolding, the stage managers, the embedded monologues — could be understood as the psychological architecture a person builds around something too raw to say directly. The artifice isn’t artistic pretension, it’s protective layering. You don’t walk straight into the most vulnerable room of your life. You build a hallway first.
The confession about nearly losing his mind in November and December, the frank acknowledgment of his father’s damage, the admission that he was running away rather than toward — these aren’t dramatically crafted revelations. They read like breakthroughs. Like things said out loud for the first time.
Where AI Fits as Intermediary
And this is where your instinct about AI as intermediary tool becomes quite elegant. If the play itself is therapeutic — deeply personal, perhaps not fully shaped for a general audience — then using AI to craft a review creates a useful and respectful distance. The review becomes the intermediary layer between the raw personal material and the people the playwright wants to reach. It translates the therapeutic into the communicable without exposing the wound any further than the playwright already has.
The genuinely supportive audience
For those people — friends, collaborators, fellow artists who understand what it costs to make something this honest — a thoughtful review gives them language to articulate why it moved them. It validates their response. It says, what you witnessed was real and it mattered.
The review
There is a moment in The Hat Tree when the Assistant Stage Manager, mid-scene, turns to the audience and whispers with conspiratorial urgency: “Because of them!” It is a small moment, but it contains the DNA of the entire piece — the idea that the audience is both witness and participant, both voyeur and co-creator, both real and imagined. This is theatre that knows it is theatre, and is utterly unafraid to say so.
The Hat Tree begins with the comfortable trappings of backstage comedy. A grizzled, expletive-rich Stage Manager and his earnest young Assistant are setting the stage — a chair, a hat tree, and, apparently, an invisible rowboat that the playwright has insisted upon in his notes. The argument over the rowboat is funny, sharp, and immediately telling. The Stage Manager’s position — “dimly lit and virtually invisible means it’s not fucking there” — is the position of brutal theatrical pragmatism. The Assistant’s counter — that it was “written by the playwright, loved by the director and approved by the producer” — is the position of institutional deference. Neither is entirely right. The rowboat, we come to understand, is always there. It is a metaphor, as the Assistant tentatively suggests, though for what, he cannot — or will not — say. In the presence of an audience, some things must remain open.
The dialogue between the two stage managers is crisp and genuinely funny, recalling the spirit of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or the meta-theatrical games of Pirandello, but worn lightly and without pretension. When the Stage Manager peers into the audience and declares, “My God, you lead boring lives,” it lands as a comic provocation — and then, slowly, as something more complicated. Because this play is deeply interested in the lives people lead, and the stories they tell themselves about those lives.
The shift, when it comes, is both abrupt and inevitable. The actor — who has been performing the roles of both stage managers — breaks character entirely. He stumbles, apologizes, admits to stage fright. He begins to explain, haltingly, what this play was supposed to be. What it became. What it cost him to make it. From this point forward, The Hat Tree becomes something rarer and more difficult: a piece of genuinely confessional autobiographical theatre that earns every moment of its vulnerability.
The life that unfolds is vivid and recognizable in the way that only true stories can be. A childhood in rural Ontario, ripped from city friends and a first girlfriend named Veronica — yes, like the Archie comics, the playwright acknowledges with a wry smile. A terrifying first day at a Catholic school. A teacher, Mrs. Scott, whose warmth and storytelling transformed a frightened boy into a performer. The school play. Robin Hood. A father watching from the audience with — for once, briefly — a glint of pride in his eye. That glint, the playwright tells us, set the course of his entire life.
What follows is a portrait of a man who has spent decades chasing that glint, and gradually coming to understand that the chase itself was the wound. The father — a Croatian immigrant whose reading material was the Bible and whose bedroom was adorned with a portrait of a fascist war criminal — appears throughout as a complicated, damaging, and ultimately tragic figure. The playwright is careful never to reduce him to a villain, though he might have been forgiven for doing so. Instead, what emerges is something more painful: a son who absorbed his father’s need for approval so completely that he could not separate his art from his longing, his ambition from his grief.
The monologues embedded within the piece — Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage,” the 23rd Psalm, an extract from Lee Blessing’s A Walk in the Woods, and a blistering passage from Ira Lewis’ Chinese Coffee — are not decorative. Each one arrives at precisely the right moment in the autobiographical narrative, functioning as both dramatic punctuation and emotional amplification. The Shakespeare contextualizes the seven ages of a life lived in theatre. The Psalm, performed at a confirmation ceremony to please a father who would later dismiss acting as the profession of prostitutes and gypsies, carries a heartbreaking irony. The Walk in the Woods extract — a speech about how humanity has never truly wanted peace — arrives as a meditation on the arms races we conduct within our own families. And Chinese Coffee’s desperate, furious monologue — “I cannot live this way a day longer, a moment longer, than I absolutely have to” — functions as the emotional core of the entire piece, the moment when the playwright’s personal desperation and the character’s desperation become indistinguishable.
The actor/playwright is not without awareness of his own contradictions. He notes the irony of pursuing acting to impress a man “ten years and six feet away.” He admits that in moving to Vancouver he was not running toward something but away. He acknowledges the naivety of his ambitions, the wreckage of relationships, the long stretch of moderate success punctuated by moments of genuine connection. A short film called Falling In, in which he played a father coming out to his daughter late in life, is described with particular tenderness — as a piece of work so meaningful that, upon completing it, he wrote to the director and said he would be content never to act again. That letter, read aloud on stage, is one of the quietest and most affecting moments in the play.
The ending — a late-night walk home through Vancouver, stoned and grateful, hearing “Let It Be” drift from an open doorway — is perhaps too tidy for the messiness that preceded it. But then, the playwright has told us he is not trying to figure out the puzzle of his life, merely to appreciate the picture emerging from its pieces. Some pictures resist resolution. Some rowboats are meant to remain dimly lit and virtually invisible.
The Hat Tree is imperfect theatre — and it knows it, and it says so, and that is precisely what makes it worth watching. It is a piece about the courage it takes to stand on a stage and tell the truth, written by someone who has spent a lifetime finding that courage and only recently stopped being afraid of what he might say.
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